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Get Custom Notifications on Your iPhone with Notifo

This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Quick Pitch: Notifo is a platform that enables mobile notifications for everything, allowing third-party services to reach users on smartphones.

Genius Idea: At its core, Notifo is a web service that can send push notifications to your mobile phone by way of a mobile application. That means you can bypass SMS messages and get alerts about stuff that is important to you. Right now, Notifo has a free iPhone app but there are also plans for BlackBerry and Android support.

Right now Notifo is slightly limited in what kinds of support it can offer. Using Push.ly, users can get Twitter replies pushed to them. Femtoo can be used to track webpage changes and also stand in for RSS. Users can also connect their Google Voice SMS alerts to Notifo, which is nice for iPhone users.

Notifo also has its own API that users can use to craft their own custom messages from different applications or locations.

We love the idea of the service and it is pretty easy to implement. We'd really like to see it support more services — maybe to mimic some of what Boxcar for the iPhone can do. It would also be great if time-based messages or reminders could be tied to calendar events or calDAV servers.

With a little polish and extensibility, Notifo could go from being useful in certain situations to being a really cool utility that could stand-in not just for SMS alerts but also general reminders, updates and feeds.

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